


Distress Greater Than Men Know

by Snickfic



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Grief/Mourning, M/M, Magic, Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Stargazing, Trees
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-07
Updated: 2018-11-07
Packaged: 2019-08-07 03:45:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16400726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/pseuds/Snickfic
Summary: He felt Loki’s searching gaze on him. Heimdall did not meet it. After a time, Loki said, “I was hoping to beg a favor of you.”As if Loki would ever suffer himself to beg. “A favor,” Heimdall repeated.“I’ve—lost sight of something. You seem the ideal person to help me find it.”





	Distress Greater Than Men Know

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wnnbdarklord](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wnnbdarklord/gifts).



> Huge thanks to my beta for helping me clear up the feelings, and to my cheerleader for inspiring me to this title. It's from the Prose Edda:
> 
>  
> 
> _The ash Ygdrasil_  
>  Bears distress  
> Greater than men know.

The ship was not a fast one. It was a pleasure cruiser, not a transport vessel or a ship of war. Heimdall stood on the bridge and stared out at stars that moved past at a pace imperceptably slow. Elsewhere, Asgardians slept or ate or sparred or sang, as they chose, but at this hour, the nearest thing the ship had to midnight, they let their one-time Gatekeeper alone.

And then he was not alone. He did not even need to turn; the shiver of the air as it opened told him enough. He kept his gaze on a nebula, years distant at this speed and shaped like a crown. He waited, without hope, for Loki to go away.

Eventually Heimdall said, “You may join me, if you wish.” 

Loki took the few steps to Heimdall’s side. He followed Heimdall’s gaze, in direction if not in distance. His hands were folded neatly behind his back, which in Heimdall’s experience boded ill. Or at least, it boded a scheme of some kind. The prospect did not enthuse him. “What do you want, Loki.”

He felt Loki’s searching gaze on him. Heimdall did not meet it. After a time, Loki said, “I was hoping to beg a favor of you.”

As if Loki would ever suffer himself to beg. “A favor,” Heimdall repeated. 

“I’ve—lost sight of something. You seem the ideal person to help me find it.”

Loki gazed out the window, apparently without a care except for a tension in the set of his mouth that wouldn’t have been there a decade ago. He’d feigned carelessness more easily then. Perhaps back then it had been nearer the truth. “Are you going to tell me what it is?” Heimdall asked.

 _It_ , Loki explained, was a door into a room of Loki’s own design. “I keep things there,” he said blandly. The room was located outside the normal constraints of spacetime, and therefore beyond Heimdall’s sight, but the door necessarily existed nearer to hand. 

“And you lost it,” Heimdall said.

Loki dismissed this with a gesture. “I lost the key. I’d tied it to Asgard, but, well. If I could locate the door, I could forge a new key.”

“And what is in this room, exactly?”

Loki shrugged. “Personal effects. Trinkets. A few items of some value.”

Heimdall had stood for centuries watching the stars with Asgard at his back and a dark-haired prince wandering in and out, prodding at whatever question interested him that day, whatever information seemed useful for his latest plot, arguing with Heimdall not to out of any disagreement but only because he liked it and because few others would tolerate it as Heimdall did. Heimdall had even enjoyed it, both the questions and the company.

But that prince had long since strayed beyond even Heimdall’s sight. Asgard was a place no more but only a people, weary and heartsick, and Heimdall was weary, too. “And should I trust you?”

The pause drew out longer than he’d expected. “I suppose not,” Loki said. He cast Heimdall a glance from the corner of his eye, waiting for some sign. Finally he pressed his lips together and walked out.

Once more, Heimdall was alone.

\--

The ship was not very large, and it was quite full of people, mostly grieving, all uncomfortable. Minor rebellions brewed by the hour. Heimdall watched Roald argue with Torvald over the placement of the cloaks on which they respectively slept, and he contemplated whether this counted as a security concern. How sharp must a private spat turn before it threatened all of Asgard? At what point must he act?

Before Heimdall could decide, elderly Gunnhilde stepped between Roald and Torvald, scolding them both. Peace restored.

That night Loki returned to the bridge. He came by way of an ordinary door this time, one that slid open and shut again when he had passed. He joined Heimdall at the window, and for a while he watched their minute progress against a backdrop of stars. He’d never had so much patience when he’d come to bother Heimdall in the observatory. Finally, casually, he said, “Your assistance really would be very helpful.”

Few enough people had visited Heimdall in the observatory. Some nobleman’s son or daughter, every so often, enamored of the stars; some minor official sniffing for scraps of intelligence. And Loki, until his interests had turned elsewhere, centuries ago. Mostly Heimdall had watched over Asgard in solitude. Now the very farthest he could go from Asgard was this bridge. There were families, huddled and sleeping, only fifteen feet beneath him. Heimdall the Far-Seer did not lack for company.

He looked upon the stars—shining brilliant and alone, light-years from their nearest neighbors—and said nothing. Eventually Loki went away.

\--

Heimdall guided the ship around a quantum asteroid field. He found Asgard its next source of supplies, a small moon orbiting Ishna. He sat through council meetings at Thor’s right hand, not that the position held any significance here. The Grandmaster’s tables were all round.

This meeting, Loki was late. It was unlike him. Thor grumbled about asking Heimdall to locate him—not seriously, never so far as to make an actual royal request. Heimdall looked anyway while Banner wrestled with the built-in projector that had worked perfectly well two days prior.

Heimdall couldn’t find Loki on his first sweep of the ship. It was on his second, more careful sweep that he saw Loki stumbling out of thin air into his quarters. Loki took a step forward, two, and then slumped to his knees on the purple shag carpet. He bowed his head, apparently catching his breath. He swore, a vicious Svartalf curse impolite in company and popular for millennia with youths of a certain age.

The projector in the meeting room flicked on at last. Banner cleared his throat and began to explain the first chart. Heimdall gazed past it; he watched Loki push at last to his feet, throw a glamour over himself with a gesture to hide the tangles in his hair and the exhaustion in his face, and stride from his quarters. Moments later he settled into the chair next to Thor’s. When Thor grumbled in his direction, Loki only smirked.

That night Loki came again to Heimdall on the bridge. Heimdall spoke first. “Your brother would be disappointed if you vanished from the ship and did not return.”

“But hardly surprised,” Loki said. 

Xandar’s star was visible tonight, yellow-bright and just larger than a pinprick. They looked at it together for a while. Loki might even have known which star it was; even now, he showed more interest in star-charts than most. Finally he said, “So you were watching, then.”

“You were late.”

“Ah. Of course.”

“Will you try again?”

A pause. “Probably.”

And this time perhaps he would not survive whatever hazards world-walking posed him. Or perhaps he would succeed in his mysterious purpose, and what would that mean for Asgard? Who could tell? Heimdall had imagined once that his sight allowed him a very prosaic kind of prediction, that one could follow the currents of the present to see the cataclysms of the future, if only one saw those currents clearly enough. He no longer thought so.

“Ask Thor,” he said, visibly startling Loki from his thoughts. “If he thinks it important, I’ll help you.”

Loki swallowed. Softly, he said, “I might not succeed. I don’t—I’d rather he didn’t get his hopes up.”

“And my hopes?” Heimdall asked.

Loki grimaced—another of those naked expressions he no longer seemed to care about hiding. Heimdall found himself wanting to trust it, which was of course a very poor idea. “My room—I keep books in it. Among other things.”

“Books,” Heimdall repeated. 

“A number of volumes from Asgard’s library. It was convenient, when—” A fleeting smile. “—when I was Odin. I could pluck them from the air rather than going all the way across the palace to fetch them. There are some valuables we could offer in trade, when traveling under the Grandmaster’s standard no longer yields us an unlimited line of credit just for the asking. Also there are some—well. Some other items I think Thor would like to know were saved.”

“But you couldn’t tell me all this the first time I asked.”

Another thin-lipped smile, slanted towards Heimdall this time. “We agreed that you shouldn’t trust me, remember?”

“And has that changed?”

“In the past week?” Loki’s eyebrows rose in polite incredulity. “No, I can’t imagine it has.”

Heimdall’s patience was exhausted. “Then why are you here?”

“You used to like it when I visited you. But I suppose that _has_ changed.”

“Loki,” Heimdall said heavily. “My prince. Have you some purpose here? Because if not, I would rather be left alone.” He should not have said it. Expressing preferences around Loki was only an invitation for him to do the opposite of whatever it was you wanted.

“Ah,” Loki said. He sounded genuinely startled, but of course, anything might or might not be genuine with Loki. “Of course.” And then he left, not bothering with the door this time.

\--

Loki returned only hours later. It was still night, in the sense that most of the ship was still asleep. Loki’s presence at Heimdall’s side shook him from the contemplation of an unnamed planet, rich with sea fauna. Heimdall had gazed upon it often, from the observatory.

But now Loki was here. “Loki—”

“Why are _you_ here?” Loki said, without preamble. “The autopilot seems to be functioning adequately. Do you think someone is pursuing us? The Grandmaster? Hela? Because if so, I think you could perhaps have mentioned it in one of these endless meetings Thor is so fond of.”

“I watch for threats to Asgard.”

“You could sleep occasionally. No one would begrudge it of you.”

“Least of all you?” Somehow, Heimdall found it in him to smile at this. And that, at last, was what loosened his tongue. “It’s quiet.”

A pause. “I beg your pardon?”

“Now, when they’re asleep—it’s the only time this bloody ship is ever quiet. Did you know, I used to go days without speaking to anyone except the king’s daily courier?”

“The ship is—populated,” Loki agreed carefully. Of course Loki preferred to secret himself away on occasion, too; likely that had been the true reason for some of his observatory visits. “And now I’ve come to pester you, just as I used to.” Loki said this easily, but there was a twist to his mouth.

Heimdall let himself imagine, just for a moment, that all these gestures and grimaces and hints of feeling were not artiface; that Loki had lost his knack for acting somewhere along the way. That the faint circles under his eyes were real and not a glamour. That he had burst onto the bridge demanding Heimdall’s purpose in being there because he actually wanted to know.

That Loki had lost some piece of himself as thoroughly as Heimdall had, when Asgard fell.

“I enjoyed the company,” Heimdall said, and was answered with the briefest gleam of pleasure in Loki’s eyes, before he hid it.

“But now I’m bothering you, so I’ll leave you in peace, shall I?” Loki said, shifting his weight and preparing to leave. To flee, perhaps, now that Heimdall had given him a kind word. Heimdall remembered that from older days, too.

“This project of yours,” Heimdall began. Loki stilled, and Heimdall turned, searching that pale face. “Does it mean ill for Thor? Or for Asgard?”

Loki met Heimdall’s gaze steadily—no pleas, no ironic lift of an eyebrow. The air seemed to shiver in anticipation. “It does not.”

“What would you have me do?”

He did not miss Loki’s quiet, relieved exhale. “I’ll need to show you what the door looks like and where I left it.” He raised his hand towards Heimdall’s head, to demonstrate what he meant.

Perhaps Heimdall should have asked if Loki’s project meant ill for _Heimdall_ , but it felt too late for that now. “Go on,” Heimdall said. He closed his eyes and felt Loki’s palm on his forehead. Loki was, as always, just a little cooler to the touch than expected. For a moment that was all Heimdall felt, only the the press of Loki’s hand. Then Loki’s memory bled into his, and he saw it: the palace, shining and whole, towering and impossibly solid. Heimdall had never had any particular fondness for it, yet he felt his throat begin to ache at the memory.

In the foreground was a hand, liver-spotted like Odin’s, but the gesture it made was Loki’s. Roots appeared, fading into visibility as if they’d always been there. They shone silver-gray with a light of their own making. They wound about the palace and the hand and the sleeve of Odin’s robe, and somehow they were more real than any of those things. And wedged between two roots, rectangular and painted Loki’s signature green, was a door.

Then Heimdall was standing on the ship’s bridge again as Loki withdrew his hand.

“You built your room in Yggdrasil,” Heimdall said.

Loki could not quite keep from looking pleased. He may not have tried. “It’s extremely secure. Very difficult to get to, if you don’t already know the way.” He made a face. “Hence my current difficulty. Yggdrasil is recovering from Asgard’s destruction by growing in all manner of new directions and forms, and I’m having trouble finding my way. But you can see its roots, still, can you not?”

Heimdall found himself regretting the answer he must give. “Yggdrasil is generally beyond the limits of my sight.” 

“Surely not,” Loki said, appalled.

“The worlds I watch operate on our level of reality. Only on a deeper level do they grow upon the great tree, and I cannot look there, any more than I can look into the Void. I’m sorry.”

“That’s unfortunate,” Loki said. He looked out towards Xandar’s star. “What if—could we look together? You can see farther than I, and I can see deeper than you. A temporary joining of our sight would not be so difficult.”

“Temporary,” Heimdall repeated carefully.

Loki turned those bright eyes on him again. “I’d give you my word, but, well.” His mouth twisted with something that could be taken for regret, if Heimdall were so inclined. 

The true hazard with Loki was not that one might mistakenly trust any particular illusory emotion, but that one would grow so tired of distrusting all of them that one would deliberately choose one to believe, just to settle the matter. And Loki had Heimdall at a disadvantage, for Heimdall had been weary before this exchange began. “All right,” Heimdall said.

Loki paused so briefly that it might not have happened at all. Then he flashed him a smile. “Excellent. Perhaps not here, though. I think we may want to be comfortable for this. Your quarters, perhaps? Or mine?”

“Mine,” Heimdall said.

Heimdall’s quarters were unremarkable, as quarters on this ship went. They were small. The bed had satin sheets of midnight blue and the walls were painted in dramatic abstract forms of blue and white. Loki followed him inside thoughtfully. The door shut. “On the bed, I think,” Loki said.

He folded one foot under himself and motioned Heimdall to do the same, so they were facing each other, easily within reach. Loki clasped Heimdall’s shoulder with one hand, and with the other he cautiously cupped Heimdall’s jaw. “It’ll be easiest if we close our eyes,” Loki said, and so Heimdall let his fall shut.

There was only darknesss at first, and the press of Loki’s palm against Heimdall’s jaw, and the steady sound of Loki’s breath. Heimdall found his own breath slowing to match it. Even with Loki so near to hand, stillness settled into Heimdall, a quiet that had consistently eluded him on this ship. All was dark and still except for each inhale, like a wave breaking upon a shore, and each exhale, the weight of an ocean receding into itself once again.

Gradually, silver curves brightened into view: Yggdrasil.

“You’ll have to direct us,” Loki murmured.

Heimdall had seen Yggdrasil in books and murals, in twisting, leafy relief around stone pillars. He had seen it half an hour ago in Loki’s own memory. But neither image nor faulty, finite memory could begin to compare with the majesty of the naked sight of Yggdrasil’s branches, winding through reality. They held the very air Heimdall breathed; their sap was his blood. He could not see beyond them.

“Steady,” Loki said. His fingers bit into Heimdall’s shoulder: a welcome, grounding pain.

The branches shuddered, and the freefalling panic in Heimdall’s gut settled, leaving behind only a mild queasines. “Where shall I look?”

Heimdall felt the stutter of Loki’s breath as if it were in his own throat. “Towards Asgard,” Loki said.

And so Heimdall looked as he had for millennia, letting his eyesight stretch across the light-years of space to that field of rubble that was all that remained of the Realm Eternal. Except now the rubble clustered near a blasted-out place in the trunk of Yggdrasil, where a branch had once been. The buds of new, silver growth had begun to fill in the space left behind.

“Are you sure the door wasn’t destroyed?” Heimdall asked. The words seemed very far away.

“No,” Loki said.

Heimdall swept his sight along heavy branches, followed silver-green shoots to their ends, peered between them into shadows. He knew the universe had ends, edges, though they hurtled ever further on at such speed that he could never have quite caught sight of them. But now, staring at the tree, it seemed quite obvious the spread of its canopy was infinite. And what had Asgard been? Only one branch, after all.

He was lost in this contemplation when he saw something odd—artificial, and not silver at all, but only a deep green. He felt Loki’s gasp in his chest as much as he heard it. Heimdall peered closer, and there it was: the green door, wedged in the fork between two branches, though Heimdall thought they were not the same branches from Loki’s memory.

“Can you show me where this is?” Loki asked very quietly. “How did we get here?” 

So Heimdall retraced their path, simplifying it somewhat now that he knew the way. He retreated and retreated, and finally he became aware of the silver of tree branches flying past as the ship rushed on towards Earth.

Startled, as if out of a dream, he opened his eyes. Here were his quarters, esoteric in their décor. Here was Loki, blinking as if he, too, had just awoken. He still cupped Heimdall’s jaw; his other hand had shifted to press against Heimdall’s chest. Loki was gasping for air, and Heimdall realized he was out of breath, too, and that sometime during the joining of their breath and sight, he’d gotten hard.

Loki swallowed. “I think that should do,” he said. “I’ll just—”

Heimdall caught Loki’s hand, pulling away from his chest. He didn’t know why, only he did not—

He did not—

Loki saw something in his eyes. Loki, whose insight blazed so bright and true at times it burned its object hollow, at other times could not throw the feeblest flame—Loki saw something that Heimdall himself could not guess at. He squeezed Heimdall’s hand; he leaned in. Heimdall had watched for thousands of years, had seen many threats and wonders approach, but even as need warmed his gut and something else, cold and tight, pulled in his chest, still it was a surprise when Loki kissed him. 

It was a cautious kiss, careful, Loki’s cool lips on his and Loki’s cool hand gripping Heimdall’s fingers. Too soon, Loki retreated, tugging his hands free. He met Heimdall’s gaze with—concern? “No doubt that was very foolish of me. I’ll apologize if you like.”

“That is not necessary.” It was all Heimdall could think to say.

Loki searched his face. Finally, with a grimace, Loki said, “I want very much to try and find my storage room now. But I—will you be here when I return?”

“If you like,” Heimdall said, echoing Loki.

Loki seemed unhappy with this response, but he nodded. “Right, then. I’ll try not to be long.” He pushed off the bed and stroked the air, and then he walked into it, World-Walker once again, and left Heimdall alone.

Alone on a ship of a few hundred souls, all crowded in around him: all that remained of Asgard. Heimdall thought of that blasted-out crater in the side of the world tree, and his eyes grew hot, and for the first time since Asgard’s fall, he wept.

\--

He couldn’t have said how much later it was when Loki walked back into his quarters. Heimdall’s tears had ebbed for now, though they were not quite dried. Loki eyed him warily for a moment and then said, “I found it.”

“Yes?”

Loki nodded. “Everything’s fine. My magic books, our histories, Mother’s—” Loki stopped, cutting his gaze away from Heimdall’s and landing finally on a blocky piece of geometry painted just above Heimdall’s bed. “In any case, you’ve been very helpful. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Heimdall said, and meant it. 

Loki gave him another hard look. “Well, I’m taken up enough of your time. No doubt you’d rather I left you alone now.”

Heimdall had shared Loki’s breath and his sight; now he looked and saw a man worn by recent years but still young, face drawn with the strain they were all under and the grief that perhaps none of them could quite fathom yet and, under everything, a guilt all his own.

Heimdall pushed to his feet. Loki’s hands hung at his sides; Heimdall brushed his fingers against them. Loki stood very still. “It was beautiful,” Heimdall said. “The world tree. I’m glad to have seen it. Thank you.”

“Well,” Loki said. He sounded a little out of breath. “Then you’re welcome, too.”

He closed his eyes as Heimdall kissed him. He didn’t taste of magic, only the evening’s dubious stew. When Heimdall cupped his jaw, his skin was cool. 

At last, Heimdall dropped his hand and shifted just far enough away to speak. Loki stared at him, eyes wide and uncertain and undone. “Stay awhile,” Heimdall said. “If you like.”

“All right,” Loki said.

\--

“Look, Heimdall,” Thor said, looking up from the book lying open on the conference table. It was ancient, bound in leather and written in a rune style not used for fifty thousand years. “Look what Loki’s found. It was Mother’s—one of her books of magic.” Thor smiled through the tears leaking from his one eye, his gaze still fixed on the volume and rapt with joy that smiles alone could not express.

Eventually, even with Loki, one must choose a mask to believe. “Well done,” Heimdall said.

[end]


End file.
